


Baby, My Love Is Yours

by poptod



Category: The War at Home
Genre: Absolute trust, First Kiss, Gen, Gender-Neutral Pronouns For Reader, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Poetry, Sweet, True Love, gay reader, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:33:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23086324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poptod/pseuds/poptod
Summary: His words make your heart ache, and you put the entirety of your trust in him.
Relationships: Khaleel Nazeeh "Kenny" Al-Bahir/Reader
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	Baby, My Love Is Yours

**Author's Note:**

> whats up its me back at it again with kenny. Male coded, male codes everywhere. Gender is never actually mentioned, though, so no pronouns or ‘woman/man’. Just a very gay male reader bc, well. Kenny IS gay and I ain’t gonna disrespect that. I’m a huge fan of gender neutral fics (as shown by the rest of my AO3) but, when it comes to gay characters, I don’t like taking that away from them.

In all honesty you haven’t known him for very long - at most, a few months, though your grasp on how time works is rather weak. If only you could pinpoint the exact date when you met. Of course, when you first met him, there wasn’t exactly a spark, or a flame, between the two of you; not even within you alone. He spoke anxious but excited, every topic lighting an excitement in his eyes, but you didn’t notice. Not until your fifth meeting.

You’d moved back to your hometown after a long trip of moving around the world, and found yourself not fitting in at all like you had before. At the age of seven, close to every kid had the same interests - having fun, playing, simply burning away the energy till that joy couldn’t come so easily. Nearly ten years later you find yourself in a place you know so well but would never again understand. You were probably the only family in town that had left the state, and that difference cut a deep separation between you and your classmates. You saw the world, and every person in it as entirely different and wonderfully unique from yourself, while many others only knew the people they’d known all their life.

Luckily, there was one person who welcomed you back rather warmly - your old friend, one of your best friends: Larry Gold. An enthusiastic boy too deep in fiction to see that the world didn’t revolve around the stories he knew, but the best shot you had at having any sort of friendships in your old, unfamiliar town. Second day back at the school he came up to you, frowning somewhat.

“You look sorta… familiar. Did we - did - were you here a few years ago?” He asks, gesturing vaguely with his hands at the mostly empty classroom, the students having long gone with the ring of the bell. “Sorry, if not,” he adds. “I just can’t shake the feeling.”

“No, uh, yeah. I was here, like ten years ago? I dunno. I’m (Y/N), you’re…” you blank for a second, before remembering his name. “Larry, right?”

“Yeah! Wow, I… wow. It’s been a while. Where’d you go?”

You catch him up on the way to the lunchroom - Montana, then to Switzerland, then to Korea, to Scotland, before moving to Italy - then Germany, and finally back to the States. 

“Holy shit,” he laughs, filling his tray up with the horrid looking lunch ‘meat’.

“It was a bit tough, to be honest. How do you fare?”

“Could be better, could be worse,” he admits with a shrug of his shoulders. “I got a best friend at least, he’s probably sitting over…” he looks over the crowd, before settling on a boy sitting alone in a corner, “there. That’s Kenny.”

You nod, not really seeing who exactly he’s looking at till he’s leading you over, and you sit across from him and Kenny.

“Hi, I’m (Y/N),” you start out with - simple enough. “I used to live here.”

Kenny doesn’t seem much for words, sitting straight up and stock still, before Larry nudges him with his elbow and whispers something indistinguishable above the raucous crowd. Stuttering he offers his hand, which you shake with a smile.

“Nice to meet you,” you say.

“I’m - Kenny.”

Lunch runs smoothly, and when it finishes Larry pulls you to the side of the rushing students.

“He’s usually not like that. But he _is_ a weird guy, just a heads up.”

Chuckling you nod, not taking his advice. Weird never bothered you, as long as it didn’t harm anybody. In fact, it’d probably do you good - befriending someone unlike the other teenagers around you. Even if you weren’t ‘new,’ you still stick out like a plant amongst rubble, or a snowstorm in summer. Abnormally tall, with clothes too expensive for the school you attend and a very clear ‘Pridefully Gay’ patch on your jacket. Doesn’t bother Larry, that or he can’t see past the end of his nose; you went with the latter.

Kenny ended up being a joy to have around once he actually gained the nerve to start talking. The two of you bonded, rather unsurprisingly for you. A ‘gaydar’ wasn’t something you put much stock in, but there were obvious signs when someone was gay, and Kenny emitted near every sign of a boy so deep in the closet he’d find shoes from 1987. You didn’t bring it up, though, ever one for chivalry. If he wanted to come out, he could do it on his own time, and you certainly didn’t feel the need to talk to Larry about it - he’d asked about your patch, and expressed a decent amount of discomfort about homosexuality.

“I get it if you don’t want to be friends anymore, but that’s a dick move,” you told him, to which he quickly agreed.

“It’s not that I don’t want to be friends, it’s just… you aren’t gonna get, like, a crush on me or anything… right?”

“No. I only like attractive men,” you told him, sparking a snort from Kenny, whom you hadn’t realized was listening.

It wasn’t until the fifth time the three of you had decided to hang out outside of school that you suddenly fell under a charm you’d previously believed didn’t exist. Sitting in the middle of Larry’s living room (your house was too far away, and Kenny’s house was apparently too strict), you were simply doing homework, you working on English, Kenny on math, and Larry on history. Fiddling with his pencil, Kenny sits next to you, and across from the both of you sits Larry.

“ _Why_ do we have to write a poem for English? Isn’t it enough that we have to do presentations on friggin’ Jane Eyre?” You grumble, running your hands through your hair.

“Having trouble?” Kenny asks, leaning to look over your shoulder.

“Everything I write sounds stupid,” you mumble, your head falling from the grip of your hands and landing with a dull _thud_ on the table. 

“Then just write something stupid,” Larry adds, helpfully, but still engrossed in his own homework.

“Here, I, uh,” he looks at you, blushing (as usual; you’d gotten used to it) before digging into his backpack and pulling out a journal. “You can use one of mine.”

“What? No. That’s cheating,” you insist, turning back to your empty paper. Kenny and Larry share a glance, but his attention comes quickly back to you.

“At least take one of my ideas? They’re on the back page,” he says softly, pushing the notebook into your line of sight, giggling slightly as it comes to cover up the entirety of your own blank journal. With a sigh and a chuckle, you relent.

“Fine, but I owe you,” you mutter, looking over the ideas. Kenny just shrugs, and turns back to his math. You’re horrid at math, and the equations he’s completing in his head send you for a whirl. If you ever start failing that class, you know exactly who’d be the best tutor.

Notes made mostly of scribbles and vague definitions litter the back page - “Made of glass,” one corner says, but it’s missing the last s. ‘Mold and melt ‘neath such wretched hands,’ ‘searching for endless trivialities,’ ‘raised on masochism.’ It’s all rather dark, and when you’re sure Kenny is fully absorbed in his work, you flip through the pages to his poems. Not to steal them, that goes against your moral code; just to read. The poems are in an even messier fashion than the jotted notes - they’re put into blocks, numbered and unnamed. Arrows point to which part connects to which, and some have notes to the side, brackets combining them, and pencil scratches blurring out the wrong words. On a few pages he clearly attempted to write about women. There are scribbles about their beauty, but it’s so vague it could be about anything. Some of the fragments are simply fragments - unconnected lines of poetry.

‘I was love, helpless love,’ you read in your head. ‘And though I do care for you, I cannot put my shame on you, and I’ve lost all that matters.’ Helplessly you search for a clean poem, something you don’t need to piece together like a million letter puzzle. Continuing your search for an idea, an inspiration, or perhaps a glimpse into the elusive personality of your new friend, you find a poem that’s definitely about boys, and it’s more loving than any other that you’d read so far. In the first part of it, he describes the boy he pines for, but it’s not incredibly specific - it mentions hair color, eye color, some skin imperfections, but not enough to pinpoint who it’s about. Then, it gets dark.

‘How bold of me to dream, to wonder. I beg you to let me waste your time, and let me burn away in your light -‘ there’s a scribbled out part - ‘I thought by know’ (it’s misspelled) ‘I might hold you, like endless apologies of existence - feel my heat as your own. But as the sky descends in heaps of empty meanings, I found I said nothing to you at all.’ The last bit is hard to read - it either says ‘empty meanings’ and ‘I found,’ or ‘endless apologies,’ and ‘I fear.’ Either way, you’d seen enough - enough to make your heart race when he looks back up at you with a smile softer than anything you’d ever known, even in the entirety of all you’d travelled through. Your mind stutters, continuing to blank even as Kenny turns away. Had you just wandered through his soul? It felt a very private notebook. Turning back to the last page, you chose a random idea, ending up with, ‘I pray to thee, sweet love’s a parasite.’

From that moment on, your life continues on as normal, with one massive disruption - you’ve got a hideously thumping crush on one of your best friends. That brings us to the present; he’s sitting far too close to you, emotionally ripe from getting kicked out of his house that afternoon, and he’s practically begging you for solace. Not with his words, thank God, but every movement he makes is needy and his chest weighs heavily against your own as he breathes softly. He’s barely touching you, but his heat manages to reach you, crowding your space without allowing himself the comfort of your touch. Larry’s mom had called you, rather late that evening, and explained the situation to you.

“I think he’s crying. I don’t want Larry helping him, I don’t think he’d help that much. Can I trust you?” She asked, and you agreed, taking your father’s pickup truck and driving it down from the mountains and into town. Once you made it to the basement, you saw the extent of his ruin.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admits, his eyes red and blotchy, matching his flushed cheeks. He’s still leaning over you on the basement couch.

“Just keep breathing,” you tell him, though you really don’t know what to do either. Your parents weren’t thrilled when you came out, but they certainly didn’t _kick you out of the house_. “Live day by day, hour by hour… minute by minute, if you have to.”

“They’re gonna take me back, right?” He says, practically pleading with you, as though you have any pull on what happens.

“I think they will,” you murmur, your eyes flicking down to his lips before meeting his eyes again. Truth wouldn’t help either of you in this situation, so you decide your soft lie would work best.

“Maybe I was wrong,” his head hangs low between his shoulders, “maybe I’m straight. I don’t wanna be gay. I - it’s wrong, isn’t it?”

“Kenny…” did you really have to come out to him? You had made no effort to hide it. Maybe he’d forgotten? “I’m gay, remember?”

“You’re not wrong, though, like I am,” his words start to come out choked, and he strains to keep talking through the tears burning his thoughts away. “Your parents still love you. Mine - I don’t want to… I don’t…” He doesn’t blink, hoping desperately that the gathering tears will recede but they fall nonetheless, one from each eye till he’s sniffing, cheeks burning as he tries to stop crying in front of you.

“Your parents still love you. Give them time,” you settle on. It’s a precarious situation, and you can’t tell what’s the right thing to say, or if saying anything at all will help.

At last he collapses, the strength of his arms giving out as he falls into you. Burying his face in the crook of your neck he hides away from the world, from his self-hating thoughts, from everything besides you. In a moment you’re all that exists to him, your arms wrapping around his waist and pulling him up so he doesn’t slide away. His warmth burns you, electrifying every nerve you have but you ignore it. There’s more important things to tend to. His breathing is uneven, so you slow your own breathing, instructing him to follow you. Half shivering he attempts to follow your lead, slowly calming from sobbing to napping away the mental exhaustion of the evening. 

As he sleeps on top of you, you kiss his temple, running your hands through his hair in a fashion you hope is comforting. When your freezing fingers touch the back of his neck he shivers, so you try to keep away from his bare skin, till you fall asleep. the weight of his body lulling you into a doze.

He wakes up around 4AM, which you only know because when he wakes he jostles you, stuttering and mumbling to himself as he crawls off of you. With a deep breath you open your eyes, looking up at him, still sitting in your lap, but clearly embarrassed.

“Oh jeez. I’m, uh, really sorry for, um.. sleeping on top of you. Oh god,” he grumbles, switching between covering the lower and upper halves of his face. 

“I don’t mind,” you mumble, still drowsy with sleep. Unsure of what exactly you’re doing you reach for him, grasping his wrist and pulling him close as you sit up. “How are you feeling?”

“Alright, I guess,” he says, just as soft as you, his expression falling. “I’m… glad you’re here. Less lonely.”

“’S what I’m here for. Did I tell you Valerius called me? She thought you liked me more than Larry,” you chuckled, the words escaping your mind before you gave them any thought.

“Who’s Valerius?”

“Larry’s mom.”

“You mean Victoria?”

“Mm… yeah.”

“I like both of you plenty,” he says, indignantly, a slight frown on his face that you can’t help but find adorable. It shows on your face, too, a smile too wide cracking open. He notices, and it only furthers his confusion. “What? I’m telling the truth.”

“I know. You’re just so adorable,” you admit, and when his eyes widen and he pales, you come back into yourself, and realize what you’d just said. “Oh, uh, you know what I, uh, mean. You know?” You stutter a lame excuse.

“I’m not adorable,” he whispers, staring straight into your eyes.

“No, handsome,” you correct yourself, making the situation infinitely worse.

“Handsome?” He practically wheezes out, losing his words and coherent thought. 

You keep a firm hold on his wrist, making sure he doesn’t go anywhere. Instead he wraps his fingers round yours, and, staring at where you meet, he holds your hand. As enthralling as it is for you it soothes him, breath instantly slowing as the pressure of his fingers trills against the back of your hand. For the moment, you put away your anxieties, and let him relish in a comfort unknown. It wasn’t illogical to assume he’d never held hands, never kissed anyone, and certainly not a boy. You had experience with this - Europe was pretty gay, and Italy awarded you your first kiss. Yet somehow, your roles had reversed; the experienced a blushing mess, as the virgin held the others’ hand in a warm composure.

His eyes close slowly as he leans in, heading for a kiss you knew would be heart wrenchingly beautiful, but you pull away.

“You’re - no. I adore you but… I can’t complicate your life. Not now,” you murmur, pressing your hand against his chest and pushing him from you. In an instant, he thinks he’s entirely at fault, and he unwinds himself till the two of you sit on opposite ends of the couch, neither of you touching the other in any way.

“I’m sorry,” he chokes out, and you can tell he’s about to cry again.

“It’s not your fault,” you rush out, scooting closer to him, but he curls into himself, and you relent. “Kenny…”

He hides his face in his hands, and he’s definitely crying now. You wait a moment before you continue, waiting for the worst of it to be over, but seeing him in any kind of pain twists your gut. 

“Kenny…” you slowly move his hands away from his face, and with a soft touch, you direct him to look at you. “I just don’t want to hurt you. You understand that… right?” He nods, and looks away. “There’s so much going on in your life. I don’t want to add to that.”

“But you make everything better,” he mumbles, crossing his arms over his knees raised to his chest, hiding his face again.

“I’m flattered you think that,” you reply quietly, at a loss for words. “I… how about.. I sit here, and you can do what you want, or make me do anything you want. For tonight.”

“What?” He sniffs, and looks back up at you.

“I’ll do anything you want. Anytime you ask. Starting tonight, my love is yours in any way you want it,” you tell him, eyes darting nervously around his face for any sign of agreement or disgust.

“Anything?”

“Yeah. Anytime.”

You’re trusting him with a lot, you both know that - but truly you do trust him, more than you trust yourself. He graces your cheek with his fingers, trailing across your imperfections as you close your eyes, melting into his touch. Shifting, he moves closer, till he’s once more sat in your lap, and you can feel his hot breath against your skin, electrifying you in the same way you keep ignoring. _It’s about him, don’t ruin this with your anxiety_ , you tell yourself, but it gets harder to listen to that voice in your head when he begins to kiss at your bare neck. Your hands shoot up, grasping at his waist as he does this, dotting your skin, up to your jawline until he lands a peck at the side of your lips. At this time, he pulls away, and you open your eyes.

He’s examining you - just as you had done to him, waiting for any sign of renunciation of your promise. But you just sit there, gazing into his eyes like they hold the universe, every answer to be asked for swirling in the gold round his pupil. So he leans in, and at first it’s just a touch; you’re pressing your lips together, still and quiet. The time passes so slowly it might’ve not been passing at all, till he leans in, and you feel the pressure so intensely that a fire could be raging around you and you wouldn’t’ve noticed. You copy the feel of his adoration with just as much tenderness, and a tiny whimper escapes him. He pulls away blushing, leaving you with a dumbstruck smile on your face.

He does a lot more to you that night, and in every second of it you swear you’re in heaven. The memory of it trails you, constantly at the forefront of your thoughts at any given moment. When you meet in school again, he holds your hand like a comfort in a world of pain, and to him it is. You exist, and that’s enough to soothe the ache of rejection, but it doesn’t fully heal, not until his parents finally take him back. 

On that day, he asks, “Are… is… are you.. still mine?” He worries, needlessly, if your trust was only to comfort him in a hard time.

“I’ll be yours as long as you want me,” you tell him, and it ends up being a lot longer than you ever would have anticipated. You’re not that stupid, you know the statistics for high school relationships, but your love persists so long there’s no other word for your relationship other than soulmates. Life deals softer blows by his side, and love adores each of your imperfections till the days die away. 

_Baby, my love is yours_

_longer than words we adore -_

_So hold me closer than you can_

_Cause baby, my love is yours._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading my heaping pile of shit! Was very fun to write. Let me know if I should keep writing stupid stuff like this or if I really need to stop :) all the poetry stuff in this is mine cause I don't trust other people


End file.
